A brief history of Trade

[AndrewTilley]

I’ve compiled all the developer information I could find concerning trade and presented it below. While it may not appear brief it’s labelled as such because it doesn’t include literally everything that’s ever been said about trade but rather contains the most relevant information, with a bias towards more recent developments.

For quotes that are derived from video content I’ve transcribed them to the best of my abilities, but you can click their source links to watch them for yourself.

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April 6, 2018

The initial trading system for the game, The Bazaar, was unveiled in a blog post back during pre-alpha. The system was essentially an auction house with certain limitations and rules. In addition, you could also trade with friends, though you had to be friends for a “reasonable amount of time”. This system did receive plenty of feedback in the subsequent months, but I won’t list all that here.

Trading! or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bazaar!

Hey there party people, it’s me Kyle Melberg, Narrative Director for Eleventh Hour Games and I’m here to talk to you all about one of the most riveting aspects of a high fantasy, monster slaying, dungeon delving, loot hoarding video game…. THE ECONOMY! Player economy is one of the most enjoyable aspects of this genre for many players and we want to do it justice In your hub city, a floating remnant of your old home that now rests in the darkness outside of time, other travelers like you have se…

April 2, 2021 & April 9, 2021

Mike Weicker explains the overarching design of the Bazaar during these developer streams, which had changed substantially since its original unveiling. Unfortunately, these streams were not archived to Last Epoch’s YouTube account so I’ve had to source my own transcriptions of them. There were far more questions asked about trade and the Bazaar during further dev streams, but I had stopped transcribing them so these were the easiest to find.

Q: Is there going to be a trade system? And if yes, how?

A: Yes, there will be a trade mechanic – a way you can get new gear from other players, or give your gear to other players for an exchange of some sort of currency. I’m purposely being very vague here because we don’t have all the details worked out for it yet. It’s something we will adjust throughout our testing. It’s not going to be anything like you’ve seen before, I don’t think.

We have a few odd goals we’re trying to achieve with our trading system and weirdly enough one of them is not making it too easy to find the gear you’re looking for, or too easy to sell the gear you have. There’s a sweet spot of convenience we want it to have where it’s a fun and engaging thing to do, but it doesn’t take up a ton of time and it’s not instantaneous. So you can’t just say, ‘okay I’ve hit level 40…I can now use unique item X and I have enough of currency Y so I’ll just go buy it and get it and I’m good to go’. This works really well in several other trading systems, for sure, but we’re trying to build it a little bit differently from scratch. That sort of interaction is something we’re trying to curb a little bit just so that it’s not instantaneous and guaranteed, I guess, so that there’s still a bit of interaction – like you’re interacting with a community and you’re playing with other players.

Source: LE Forum Link

Q: Can you explain plans for the Bazaar?

A: I can’t really explain this – you guys are giving me a bunch of stuff that I unfortunately can’t talk about very much. Umm, plans for the bazaar I can talk about from a theoretical standpoint – in the things we’d like it to achieve – which is kind of similar to what I was talking about last week, unfortunately. We want the bazaar to create a sense of community. We want people to have a place to go to trade and interact with other players. We want it to be something you go do – like I’m going to go search the bazaar for something and less a, and this is the example I gave last time, I hit level 40…I’m going to get my level 40 unique boots that I know are going to be for sale in the bazaar as soon as I get there for ten thousand gold or something, you know.

It’s about getting that core feeling of it’s a tool to help promote community. I think that’s really important. Having trade not be instantaneous is a little bit important, and not having it be guaranteed is a little bit important too. So having it be something where you are searching for the right thing – okay, you ever go to a flea market and you’re hunting for a game or something like that and there’s 80 different shops and they each have games and you’re digging through them all for this specific game. It’s this type of feeling that we’re more interested in invoking, rather than just a search box. It’s tough because we don’t have any of this stuff done yet so I can’t say exactly what it’s going to look like or be with the exact rules and restrictions it’ll have.

Source: LE Forum Link

May 20, 2021

Judd Cobler, LE CEO and Game Director, hosts an AMA on Reddit and inevitably receives some questions concerning trade. I found this quote of particular importance because it outlined the design goals of their future trading system, at that time.

More information will come about the trading system after we’ve been able to test its implementation a bit further! However a few design goals that will give you an idea:

1. Don’t ruin the chase. We want people to be excited about going into the world, killing monsters, and having the chance to get great upgrades
2. Bring people into the same space so it feels like a living/breathing world
3. Don’t build a system where people feel like they need to go outside of the game to be efficient

Source: Reddit Link

July 20, 2021

The Multiplayer FAQ is published which echoed much of what Mike said during the developer streams.

What will the trade system be like?
Our current plans regarding the trade system are still a work in progress and will require scale testing, but are centralized around having an area for players to congregate called The Bazaar. In the Bazaar you can visit other player’s shops and purchase items for in-game gold. The player shops that appear are random so the act of finding gear that you are interested in feels like browsing an active bazaar instead of finding players on third party websites to trade with directly. We want the main item hunt to remain outside of trade so making this an enjoyable experience but not the clear best way to obtain better items is our goal. Players in a party will also be able to gift items to each other, as long as the item dropped after both players joined the party.

Source: Archived LE Forum Link

EHG responds to some initial feedback about the system on Reddit.

Leaving and re-entering the Bazaar will not reroll what’s on offer.

Source: Reddit Link

What about closing the game and re launching it?

That does not reroll it either. There’s no manual action you can take to reroll it, it just happens occasionally.

I love the game but I’m very worried about trade and multiplayer and how it will affect current loot drops and gold and all that stuff.

We’re very specifically trying to avoid trade overshadowing loot drops and crafting, and we’re hopeful that it can be avoided with this sort of trade system. Even if you use the Bazaar, most of your items should still come from drops and crafting, and if that’s not happening our first course of action will be to reassess the Bazaar rather than rebalancing the game or its drops.

Source: Reddit Link

This new version of the Bazaar would garner a lot of player feedback across multiple platforms over the coming months.

January 27, 2022

In a developer blog it’s announced that several previously planned systems were being removed from the forecast, which included the Bazaar. There were no details given about the new Item Trading forecast item that took its place.

We have removed the Bazaar from the card and added item trading in its place.

The final system we want to discuss is the Bazaar. We spoke to our ideas regarding the Bazaar in the Multiplayer FAQ in July of last year. Since then, we listened very carefully to all of the dialogue concerning trade and had a lot of conversations internally as a result.

After a lot of discussion about the various challenges to our proposed direction, we no longer feel that the Bazaar is the best way to go about player trading in Last Epoch. While player trading will still be a part of the game, we’re planning to take a different approach. We will be talking more about our reasoning here, as well as the future of trading in Last Epoch, in a dedicated post in the coming months.

Source: January 2022 Development Update

April 27, 2022

Twitch streamer Zizaran interviews Stanzwar and Mike Weicker. They discuss a multitude of topics, with trade being one of them. Considering Stanzwar’s role in multiplayer development it stands to reason that his comments on trade would carry a lot of weight. Personally, I find much of what’s said here to be some of the best information we have on what a future trading system may look like.

Zizaran: That brings me to my next question, trading. What are you guys thinking about this?

Stanzwar: Trading’s been an interesting one where we – so at first we announced the Bazaar that we were really engaged in doing. We got a lot of really great player feedback about the Bazaar in terms of how that could play out, how that impacts a RMT economy, and how that emphasizes player behaviours. Path of Exile really believes in its existing player economy, we still want to do something very different. We’ve chose to – ah, right now we’re still analyzing if we’re going to go in that kind of direction. I’d say recent conversations with people have kind of put us back to the drawing board, but the goal is we want to have trading between players. We don’t want to have the same emphasis on an economy that Path of Exile has because I think that’s difficult to manage. I think that requires another chunk of a giant team to add to the studio. I think that adds a whole other meta element to the game that players have to manage and caretake that we have to consider in its entirety.

Zizaran: Right. Interesting, makes sense. Yeah I look forward to seeing what that looks like. Personally I’m a big fan of bind-on-trade at least. Obviously a lot of games end up turning into flipping fests.

Stanzwar: Yeah, we’ve discussed bind-on-trade a lot ourselves. Oh, sorry Mike.

Mike: We really want to emphasize the experience of like, ‘oh I’m playing with my buddy and maybe they’re not online right now’ or ‘maybe they are with me and I find something that is really great for them’ and still being able to share that experience by being like, ‘hey, look what I found for you’ and having that feel really good is still really important to us.

Stanzwar: And how do you avoid that turning into a website?

Mike: Exactly. That’s the struggle we’re under.

Zizaran: Yeah, that’s a hard question and it’s hard to go back.

Stanzwar: Yeah that’s the thing, it’s hard to go back. So the goal is that, you know, when we’re in private testing we’ll open up our first elements of trade that we know we’re going to stay with and then we’re going to have to be very careful of what we put on top of that. As long as we do that when we’re small we can maybe make decisions that change things before we open it up to more people. So we will definitely be experimenting and be very open-minded about what worked.

Zizaran: You could have a league-wide group found, like up to eight people or six people which you can trade per league.

Mike: That’s an option we’ve talked about for sure.

Stanzwar: We’ve considered like every option on the entire set of the spectrum. The way I put it in one design meeting was like, think of every other game that’s ever existed and imagine every possible trade problem that could have been had. They’ve probably all happened. What are we looking for in there? What set of problems and solutions are we going to be most happy shipping with? So it takes a lot of research and understanding and broadly speaking to everything that an economy has ever been online.

Source: YouTube Link

Zizaran: When multiplayer is live will item scarcity be increased due to trading?

Mike: Great question and that’s one I see pop-up in like Reddit, Discord, and our forums quite a bit. Whenever the conversation of trading comes up this question is right there with it and the short answer is we really want it to have as little impact as possible. We know it’s going to have probably some impact on it, but if we can keep that to almost zero that would be great. That’s the goal and that’s a big concern and consideration when we’re designing our trade system – is how do we keep the impact on SSF players to a minimum so it’s still fun to play the game solo? It’s a really hard problem to crack and I don’t have a good like, this is how we’re doing it answer. I guess the answer to the question is hopefully as little as possible and it’s something that we are really actively working towards.

Stanzwar: Tune it once online, that’s going to be a big thing. It’s going to have impacts that we may not even anticipate, but we’re going to have to be aware.

Mike: A lot with trading is we never want to invalidate going out and just killing monsters yourself. That’s the big part of it. As long as you don’t invalidate that experience the solo self found is probably fine.

Source: YouTube Link

Zizaran: When you’re trading do you feel like it’ll only be items that’ll be tradeable with your friends or do you think shards, runes, and glyphs will be as well?

Mike: I think we want, and I’m going to kind of skirt the question a little bit, but I think we want shards and runes and glyphs to be items. We really push to have all the properties that shards, runes, and glyphs have to be properties of items. I know the line kind of blurs when they go to a different inventory.

Zizaran: Yeah, so will we be able to pull them back out then?

Mike: I’d say probably. Very, very likely.

Source: YouTube Link

Zizaran: Will gold be the main thing to trade with? But it doesn’t seem like that’s the case.

Stanzwar: Yeah, that won’t be the main thing because we’ve all played single fiat currency games. There has to be other ways to want to trade. Back to what I was saying about the economy – that is one of the perfect examples of a thing that will be challenging to discover things about as we go live and start experimenting with trading. We have things that people have that are of a type, like say our crafting items are a thing of a type, that other games have had available for trade but how does that play out and what’s the relative value. There’s a good and scary part about this, is that once you can trade those things you get like the SoJ problem. We’ll call it a problem. What is the thing considered the most valuable based on its rarity and then players focus in on that and then it becomes the de facto currency. How do you deal with that? We expect we’ll probably be playing with areas like that where we’re going to uncover what people find the most valuable in our inventory system as soon as we make things tradeable and I think that’s going to help us drive an understanding of what we can do next. If we do it early and small before a lot of players have it we can make changes before it becomes the standard because by the time the SoJ was the standard the devs couldn’t fix it by that point.

Source: YouTube Link

Zizaran: Going back to Diablo 2, do you feel like trading in high runes and Stone of Jordan’s is a bad thing and something you want to avoid then?

Stanzwar: No. It’s going to depend. It’s really important that – like for me, I don’t have a philosophy I’m going to try to fulfill. I don’t think the designers have a philosophy we’re going to try to fulfill. The goal is that people are engaged with trading, they find it meaningful, and they find it fun. If gold somehow becomes the de facto standard for trading because we’ve added some ridiculous number of gold sinks into the game then that’s awesome because there’s not a lot of games that do that very well. We think we’ve added some interesting gold sinks lately so we might very well have a chance of doing it, and then we’ll have to see how that plays out though. What does that do for the gameplay? Are people going to start targeting the optimized gold farming time area over and over and how does that impact the overall experience of Last Epoch.

Source: YouTube Link

May 13, 2022

Not much shared here, but we learned that there wasn’t a trading system in testing at this time.

Forgive me if you’ve already answered this, but will multiplayer have party trading at the start or is that to be added at a later time?

I don’t know what order any sort of trading systems will be implemented in regards to when multiplayer opens up to a larger group. There is not currently any way to trade items in multiplayer. There’s no system like that set up at the moment, so maybe.

Source: YouTube Link

June 10, 2022

There’s not a whole lot new here about RMT, but considering I don’t have previous dev streams that talk about it I figured I’d include this more recent discussion on the topic.

How will how will you tackle real money trading if it becomes an issue?

So this is one of those things that’s going to depend very heavily on what’s allowing real money trade to thrive and it will affect how we approach it. The most important part about dealing with that is providing a positive play experience for the people who aren’t using the RMT system. So focusing on not ruining the game for people who are playing it the way it’s intended I think is the the key approach there. If we’re like, ‘oh we can stomp out RMT completely but it’s going to make everyone’s lives suck’ then that’s probably not a good solution to do. Maybe there’s a second option there at the same time that’s like, ‘well it doesn’t remove it completely but it makes it so it’s kind of poor and inefficient or something like that but it doesn’t affect everyone else who’s playing normally’. We’d probably go with that second option.

I say probably and everything because it’s on a case-by-case basis, but the focus will always be keeping the game fun, engaging, and enjoyable for the people who are respecting the intention and the rules and all that. A big part of that is having the game fun for everyone who is following the no RMT guidelines type thing. RMT is one of those weird things where stamping out RMT stuff is something that helps make non-RMT gameplay fun because you’re not competing with people who are paying money when you’re not. It’s definitely a fine line and a tricky thing to answer. Hopefully that gave you some idea of the approach we’d take.

Though, in the event that it happened a lot of times it’s something as simple as just being able to detect the accounts that it’s happening on and banning them. When there’s a sticker price on the game and every time you ban someone they have to pay $35 dollars to get back in that naturally deters RMT. So if you can find an account that’s providing a lot of RMT services and you can ban that account before they make $35 dollars worth of profit each time you can make it unviable for them to continue to do that. As long as we’re just making it harder than it is to keep up and make a reasonable profit people won’t bother.

Also, the nature of the trading system as a whole will probably make RMT really difficult to do effectively.

Source: YouTube Link

June 22, 2022

From my research this appears to be the first mention of trade not being included in patch 0.9. This was the same day that the June Dev Update was released, announcing patch 0.9 as the next update. This certainly sparked a lot of renewed interest in the topic of trade.

Will there be trading or just playing together?
I haven’t read the whole post but I assume its just playing together.

Correct - 0.9.0 will include the multiplayer Beta, this will have all current Last Epoch systems, but not the full tailored multiplayer experience. It is not currently planned to have a trading system with 0.9.0.

Source: Discord Link

June 24, 2022

It’s a very quick answer by Mike that appears to be the spark for the Reddit post below it, though it’s hard to confirm that.

Can you share any details of what to expect from the multiplayer release? For example, in-group trading.

In-group trading will probably not be in the initial version of it.

Source: YouTube Link

June 29, 2022

Mike’s comment during the June 24th dev stream appears to have generated a lot of feedback on Reddit, with many more developer responses than just this one. If you want to read them all be sure to visit the source link of the Reddit thread below.

Shamelessly hijacking the top comment to clarify what I meant on stream (yes I’m Mike from the streams). I usually would just wait until the next stream to clarify this but it’s going to be Canada day on Friday so we’re skipping a week.

First off, oof I have to be careful with terminology and I really need to define each term clearly because this has bitten me in the butt before.

I do not know what, if any form of item transference or trade between players will be available at 0.9.0. It is not finalized and will likely change a few times between now and then.

The question I thought I was answering was “Will I be able to walk up to a random person, open a trade window, each place items into said window, each hit accept and receive each other’s items?” That is not going to be available. I know that’s not how the question was worded but when people ask if they can trade, that’s what I always think it means. I’m sorry and I’ll be more careful with my wording next time.

We do not currently have any form of trade or item transference or item sharing at all available in our closed alpha testing. We are currently in the process of much more important pieces of multiplayer functionality like making dungeons work for example. Once we have feature and content parity with single player, we will continue on to the rest.

We get a lot of calls to “just release what we have” and to “not release until we have feature xyz”. We are going to weigh the options of timing and features and release when we think is most advantageous overall. When we release 0.9.0 it might be missing features you think are essential. I’m sorry if that happens and I hope we can fill those gaps as quickly as possible.

What I’m hearing here is that a lot of people really want some way to share items with their friends. There are many different ways to do this and I’m not sure it’s possible to make everyone happy. We’re gonna do our best and then take in feedback like we always do and evaluate what needs to change. Once we have more concrete information on what is going to happen, we will be sure to share it more accurately than me bumbling around making a fool of myself.

Trust me when I say that I/we keenly feel the sting of playing as a Bladedancer and hearing the Sorcerer player say that they just found a Smoke Weaver and have no use for it. It’s been gnawing at our soul since day 1 of multiplayer testing.

Source: Reddit Link

July 3, 2022

This is basically more of the same, but I’ve included it anyways.

All the available info about the potential trade systems are out of date. We have not released any information about our current 1.0 plans for trade.

1.0 plan? So there will not have trade system on 0.9?

Can’t share anything yet about 1.0 plans for it. 0.9 won’t have a D2/PoE style free trade, walk up to a random person and open a trade window, trade system.

Source: Discord Link

I never talked about a D2/PoE trade style. Just talked about a Last Epoch trade style, whatever it is. And so whether we will have it at 0.9 or whether we will have to wait for 1.0

I don’t have any more information about trade available right now. If you’ll see it in 0.9, what form it will be in if we do, when that will be. All not finalized and not ready to talk about.

Source: Discord Link

July 7, 2022

A lot of talk about trade not being included in 0.9, the overall complexity of it, and the possibility of having to delay multiplayer further to include it. That last part generates a lot of future discussion.

Can you clarify if we will be able to share drops while playing in a party or if that is also considered part of “Trade”?

I can’t clarify what will happen because it is not finalized yet. When we have any more information on if 0.9.0 will have trade and what that will look like, it will be shared clearly and very obviously. This is an extremely complex problem and this isn’t simply a decision of if we want it or not.

Source: Discord Link

Please do not underestimate the complexity that “simple drop trading” involves. This isn’t a matter of want.
We have been unable to trade items with each other playing multiplayer for months now. We are extremely aware of the frustrations this brings. Hypothetically, would you prefer to wait for multiplayer to get drop trading?

Source: Discord Link

Yea, so we’ve got to figure out how long it will take to make and weigh that against how important it is to have and then decide if we want to try and get some sort of trading in for 0.9.0 or not. It’s a tricky thing because we get lots of feedback from people saying both sides are majority of what people want. So we’ve just got to figure out what’s best and we haven’t got there yet.

Source: Discord Link

Drop trading might actually be harder to do. The situation is constantly evolving.

Source: Discord Link

July 8, 2022

Mike deals with the fallout of hypothetically having to delay multiplayer for trade, and also provides some background as to why trade isn’t quite as easy to implement as some may think.

You’ve talked a few times about needing to delay 0.9 if trade is to be implemented.

I see where you’re coming from there and I was really trying to be careful the way I worded those things because I’ve said those things a few times on Reddit and Discord. How I think I’ve said it each time was, ‘hypothetically, if you had to delay multiplayer to get trade in would you want that?’ I was really trying to word it in such a way that we don’t have to delay multiplayer to get that in or not, but if it came down to that how important – I was trying to gauge the importance of that feature because a delay is a big deal and if it’s worth a delay to you than it’s really important, generally.

Do you know how long the delay would be?

No.

Assuming the most basic possible trade implementation.

This is the other thing as well. There’s a lot of misconceptions about how easy a “basic” implementation is. The most basic implementation requires a complete restructuring of every single item and item system in the game. There’s a lot of things where you’d probably be like, ‘well obviously it doesn’t affect that’. It does. Blessings are items. It would affect blessings. It wouldn’t affect them very much and that’d be a very quick thing to do, but that portion of it would be one of the smallest portions.

There’s an insane amount of things that have to be changed. Just the way an item is serialized – so when you have an object in the game world, this relic for example, it has all these properties on it and that gets converted into a string of numbers that represents that information. So it condenses that information which is then read by the game. This is how we can update items when we update the game because we just tell the game to interpret the way an item is saved differently and it will effectively change the item even though the actual item doesn’t change – the way the game reads that piece of data changes. So we have to change the way that data is even stored to make trading possible. Yeah, how messed up is that.

There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s not a matter of well no, we don’t just not want to have trade or anything like that. It’s a matter of how much time and effort does this take. Is it possible without making massive changes, you know. So I don’t have a specific hypothetical delay there could be for that, sorry.

Source: YouTube Link

Is the Bazaar still planned or was it scrapped?

It was scrapped.

Will multiplayer revolve around trading as a general design?

Not revolve around, no.

Is it planned for the future even if trading will not come in 0.9?

The comment you’re referring to is one I made two weeks ago and I’m really sorry about that comment. It was very misleading and I did a very poor job of what my job is. What I said last week is trading won’t come – what I was referring to was that we hadn’t planned to have a, ‘hey you random person in the world’ and ‘hey you random person in the world, lets open a trade window, lets put each of our items into a trade window, lets press accept and have our items switch’. That is what I was referring to not being planned for 0.9.

Source: YouTube Link

July 22, 2022

Most of what Mike says here echoes comments made by Stanzwar during the Zizaran interview.

Did you guys ever say what kind of trade system you’re planning on implementing?

No.

Diablo 3 style, bind-on-trade, something like that? All I recall is no Bazaar and no free trade.

The trade system is still very much up in the air. We don’t have anything set in stone yet, nothing’s implemented yet, and we’re still figuring out the best thing to do. There’s a lot of conflicting requirements and it’s kind of a cursed problem. If you’re interested and never heard of the term cursed problem there’s a sweet GDC talk about it. Cursed problems are difficult to deal with, but not impossible. Basically what it means is there’s conflicting requirements, so you want two things but they each say if you do this you can’t do the other so you got to find a creative solution.

We’re still working on exactly what’s going to happen but I think people will – it’s also important to note that whatever we do decide on, at least initially, is not set in stone. If we’re like this is our trading system and we get a ton of feedback and people are like this sucks and here’s why, after trying it most specifically, we’re not afraid to change things. So if it’s not good enough, it’s not living up to our standards, we can accept that it needs to be changed if it needs to be changed.

Source: YouTube Link

August 26, 2022

Not a whole lot new here either, other than reconfirmation that an auction house type system is not being planned for trade.

Last Epoch will have an auction house, correct?

No.

In Diablo 3, while it had an auction house, the best way to make more money was to become a “merchant” reselling stuff. Will Last Epoch avoid that somehow?

Uh yeah, we’re not doing that. We’re not doing a Diablo 3 auction house. I think the auction house – what’s the opposite of a hot-take, a cool-take? The auction house was the worst part of Diablo 3. It almost killed the game. Like if anything could have killed it, that was it. I don’t think it actually killed the game, but it tried real hard.

I know there’s rumours that get floated around about what’s going to happen. If anyone tells you they know what trade is going to be like in Last Epoch, they’re guessing or lying…or possibly both. Or breaking NDA, but even then partial guessing still.

Source: YouTube Link

You said Last Epoch won’t have an auction house, but isn’t there a function called Bazaar planned? What’s the difference?

The Bazaar was planned quite a while ago, it is no longer planned. There was an update that went out but I know that not all that information gets disseminated properly to everyone. The big difference between the Bazaar plan and an auction house was that there – auction houses generally have a single place you can go to that you can browse and search and view all items simultaneously that are available in that system. The Bazaar was not planned to be that way. That’s the big difference between the two. But I agree, they did share quite a few similarities.

Source: YouTube Link

The Present

Currently, we still don’t know what trade system is planned for Last Epoch, or if patch 0.9 will include some form of trade. The Official Last Epoch Multiplayer FAQ still holds the only knowledge we have of trade, which isn’t much:

What will the trade system be like?
Our current plans regarding the trade system are still a work in progress and have been altered since information about the previously planned Bazaar system had been released. More information will be released in 2022.

Will players be able to give their friends items?
If they were playing together in the same party when the item dropped they will be able to gift one another the item.

Are you changing loot drop rates or crafting because of multiplayer?
Perhaps. But if so, not drastically. We want the drop rates to be mainly balanced around self-found and feel we are doing a decent job of this right now. Because of the way the trade system is planned to work we don’t believe this will throw off the balance of the item hunt drastically.

Takeaways

So what can we glean from all this data? Well, we can make some fairly good assumptions about the design goals for any future trade system EHG implements. These would likely be:

• trade should not invalidate going out and killing monsters
• trade should have as little impact on the SSF experience as possible
• trade should take place in-game without the need for third-party resources
• players should be able to trade with their friends
• players should find trade engaging, meaningful, and fun
• an economy similar to PoE’s isn’t desirable as it requires additional resources to maintain
• the trade system should discourage RMT, or at least make it so undesirable that it’s not worth doing
• gold will likely be competing with other resources for the role of dominant trading currency

Instanced party trading has been a confirmed feature for a long time now, and would make a great candidate for the first element of trade to be implemented. The next element of trade would likely allow friends to trade with each other regardless of if they were in the same instance or not. This will certainly be challenging to accomplish without conflicting with some of their design goals, but as Mike says it’ll require creative solutions. Also, we know that any trade system(s) implemented are not final and subject to change based on both player feedback and how they perform in large scale testing.

As we’ve learned, trade wasn’t planned for patch 0.9. Though, if we look at previous forecasts, trade has never been aligned with multiplayer so this really isn’t new information. Even the latest iterations of the forecast don’t have Multiplayer & Trading bundled as a single item, they’re still listed as separate items.

https://i.imgur.com/P1Pb4U5.png

The likelihood of trade arriving alongside multiplayer in patch 0.9 will probably come down to a few key factors:

• the current state of multiplayer development
• the difficulty, time, and resources it would require to implement trade
• how much EHG perceives its exclusion would impact the overall reception of multiplayer
• and if including trade now moves multiplayer out of a favourable launch window or delays 1.0 in any significant way

As Mike states in some of his comments, they’ve received opposing feedback of the necessity for trade in the 0.9 patch. Considering the release of multiplayer may still be several months out this decision could go either way. Selfishly I’d prefer multiplayer and trade release together, but I also understand the development and business realities that may not make that feasible.

---

I realize this post doesn’t really bring any new information on trade, but I had some spare time to kill and who doesn’t like talking about everyone’s favourite polarizing subject?

Did I exclude any valuable trade information? Do you agree or disagree with my takeaways of the data? Or have any good theories as to what trade system they’ll eventually implement?

[TriKster]

Bro…all the hard work you put into your threads…
Amazing! Thanks for doing that!

[AndrewTilley]

I wasn’t planning on adding to this thread, but the latest dev stream brought some interesting new information on the topic that I felt should be included here.

---

September 2, 2022

What trading system are you going to use when multiplayer comes out?

Unfortunately we don’t information on the details of the trading system that will be added to multiplayer when it comes along. We know it’s a very important topic for a lot of people and it is something we’re taking very seriously. Like we’ve been playing multiplayer internally without any sort of item transferring system what-so-ever, and it sucks when you pick up an item that you know the person you’re playing with can’t use. That just stings so we’ve definitely been feeling that for the last little while.

We did have our first successful item transfer through networking from one character back to that same character, but still it transferred through the network. It has happened at least once now.

Source: YouTube Link

In the interview with Zizaran in January, Stanzwar suggests that gold won’t be the main currency to trade with. Is that still the stance for EHG?

I don’t have anything I can say about it, sorry. We’re still not ready to talk in detail about trade. Yeah, I’d love to give you more information. When we’ve got something – I think we’ll probably have a big dev blog that’ll just lay everything out with trade. I know it’s a big topic of question for everyone. Everyone’s really interested to see what happens. I really want to get more – like I said earlier in the stream, you may have missed it but I said it really quickly, we just had this week our very first item that went through the servers and came to a person. Like it left someone and came back to them for the very first time. It was back to themselves so it just went out and back to themselves, but still that’s like the essence of what needs to happen to make trade work and we’ve just had our very first time of that happening. It’s still so early that we don’t have any like testing done on it, there’s no feedback…even internal feedback on it. Like we really need to get more of that together before we can talk about it in-depth. I’m sorry but we don’t have any information for that, yet.

Source: YouTube Link

Judd Cobler added this comment below in Twitch chat while Mike was answering the question above.

We’ll talk about trade soon. First implementation we’re actually testing is underway.

---

So it’s now officially the early days of trade testing, which is exciting news. While it doesn’t answer any questions as to what type of trading system it’ll be or if it’ll be included in patch 0.9, it’s still an important achievement and milestone for the team working on it. I look forward to learning more in the future.

[mabllo]

Thanks for the work. Good read at work when things are slow.

My take is just wait and see what comes up. Pointless to guess and dream about how trade should be etc. Rather it takes a while and comes out good, than be promised the moon and be delivered a pebble so to speak.

[FrodoFraggins]

I’m glad to hear that they are testing a version of trade and hopefully it will show up in some form in 0.9. There’s really not much more to say until they’ve revealed their plans.

[AndrewTilley]

I probably won’t feel the need to update this again, but we did receive a lot of information surrounding trade in the last couple weeks that I felt needed to be added here. None of this information included any specifics as to how trade will work or anything but rather how it’s progressing, and that some form of trade would indeed be included in patch 0.9.

---

September 9, 2022

Mike reiterates much of what he said during the September 2, 2022 dev stream.

Q: Do you have a post up for your most current thoughts on trade economy for multiplayer? Like how it’ll work, etc.

No, we don’t actually. There’s basically no information up on the way trade is going to be at all at the moment. We’re still pretty early in its development and we’ve realized that we need to be able to test it and make sure it’s what we want before we really detail to everyone what it’s going to be. In fact, we’ve just had our very first successful item transfers. We’re really early in the testing of item transfer systems and we’re still working out all the kinks on those systems. We’ll need to get some testing in before we finish the design and start actually talking about what it’s going to be.

Source: YouTube Link

September 14, 2022

This was the first of two Multiplayer Dev Q&A streams that took place. Judd talks about trade from a high-level viewpoint and reveals that their first trade system will be tested by the Community Testers in the coming weeks to get feedback on before being unveiled to everyone at a later date. Also, Dan speaks to just how much they’ve discussed trade and the options they’ve considered.

@AndrewTilley

Judd: There’s going to be a lot of questions around trading today and we’re probably not going to dive too deep into our trading system and how loot will be exchanged between players because we want to make sure that we take a step back and put all that in writing and make sure that you guys have all the reasoning and understanding. We’re also still testing these things. So we’re actually going to be implementing our first trade system inside of our CT test here in the very near future to get feedback on.

Source: YouTube Link

@AndrewTilley

Q: With multiplayer, how is Last Epoch going to deal with “ease of access” to gear? There are criticisms of the trade systems of Path of Exile (free trade to all) and Diablo 3 (essentially 0 trade). What are long-term and short-term plans for Last Epoch in relation to trading gear and crafting materials?

Judd: We’re mindful of how our systems up to this point have been created to enable a great solo experience. With the Monolith giving an amount of target farming paired with our directed crafting system, gear drops in multiplayer will be individual and a core goal for trade in Last Epoch will be to ensure that it does not significantly take over progression from those systems. Again, when it comes to trade, we’ll be trialing a version of trade in the coming weeks within our CT program that we hope to get good feedback on.

Zizaran: Cool. It’s going to be a hard problem to solve. It must be interesting entering a genre that has so many other games in it as well.

Judd: Oh absolutely, and trade is so incredibly important to how progression in these games come about. We completely understand the implications that implementing any type of trade inside of these games have and we’re approaching it very carefully and thoughtfully with all the experience from the other games in the genre before us.

Dan: Yeah, a lot of the time talking about trade we recognize breaking down all of the problems that other games have made numerous attempts at systems and we kind of had history to understand it.

Source: YouTube Link

@AndrewTilley

Q: What happened to the ideas of a restricted trading that were referred to as the bazaar during the Kickstarter?

Judd: Yeah, the bazaar. We were very keen on this idea, enough to even actually speak about it publicly back in, I think, like 2019 or something. There was an extensive thread that I still think has more comments than any other thread that we’ve ever posted. In short, we found a number of flaws with the system that didn’t line up with our goal of not letting trade take over the gearing progression that we’ve solidified into the game. There were a lot of aspects of it that we were keen on but it just ultimately didn’t meet our expectations for what we want in a trade system.

Zizaran: Right, and you didn’t really have anything final to say about where trade is going, right?

Judd: Not yet. What I can say is that we don’t want a trade system in the game to be the best or most efficient way to always gain gear upgrades.

Source: YouTube Link

@AndrewTilley

Q: With multiplayer coming in now and the potential for trading, have you guys talked about things like bind on equip, bind on pickup, bind on trade?

Dan: Oh yes, and I believe a couple of the conversations that we had to great length were when you mentioned them, but we’d also thought about them ourselves too. So yes, we have thought heavily about all of those things and we’re taking them under consideration. We’ve gone as far as to discuss even how RuneScape does its economy. We’ve looked all the way back. We even discussed the actual bazaar in EverQuest. We’ve gone through the history of economies and MMO’s and ARPG’s to try to figure out what about them we enjoy the most. So it’s been very in-depth. That’s why we don’t want to speak too much on it now as we’re still kind of bringing light to that whole process that we’ve been working on for so long.

Source: YouTube Link

September 15, 2022

In this second Multiplayer Dev Q&A stream Judd and Dan reiterate a lot of what was said in the first stream – detailing many of the high-level goals they have for trade and how important it is that they get it right for the game they’re trying to make.

@AndrewTilley

Q: What are the plans for trade?

Judd: Yeah, we know that people are anxiously awaiting information on trade. It has huge implications in games like this. We won’t be unveiling our updated plans for trade today, but I will say that our first trial of trade is going into the CT build to gather feedback on within the next week or so. I will say that our main goal with trade has always been to ensure that it does not become the main or always best way to obtain gear, upgrades, and sidestep the item hunt and crafting system we’ve poured a lot of love into. So those are the main goals and we have a trial for what this will be. Hopefully we’ll get good feedback on this when it comes out in the near future for our CT program.

Dan: Yeah, I think you were mentioning that, you know, something that we talked about before – you don’t really want to promise things about a trade system before you’ve actually had a chance to test it, try it, and get good player feedback. So we definitely want to make sure we do that this time around.

Source: YouTube Link

@AndrewTilley

Judd: In general, we try to provide everything that a player is going to need directly in-game. We go really over and above here, or at least we try to, and we’re going to continue to. There’s things like the in-game guide that will give you a lot of information. We’re trying to make it so that with the trade system that we incorporate it doesn’t make you actually have to leave the game. We’re trying to make that all-inclusive in the game itself.

Source: YouTube Link

@AndrewTilley

Q: Will the item crafting process or itemization be adapted due to multiplayer release?

Steelmage: I think you probably covered this yesterday, but it’s a pretty big one right – the way multiplayer is going to change gear acquisition and gearing and all that.

Dan: Yeah totally. I mean, for us, it’s important that items primarily come from finding and crafting them. We do think that process feels pretty good right now. It’s a priority to avoid kind of compromising what we have. We’re not really going to give out details to trade yet, which is where this is slowly going, but it’s definitely a huge priority that we don’t disrupt what we have for the itemization process going into launch.

Steelmage: I know a lot of people really like that genuine – like balanced around solo I guess is the way of putting it. Like you can play the game and get very far on your own. It does feel good and it doesn’t feel very good when it feels like you have to trade to progress your character – like that is the most efficient path.

Dan: Totally.

Judd: We don’t want to disrupt that.

Dan: Absolutely.

Source: YouTube Link

@AndrewTilley

Q: So should we just talk about trade again? I mean, because a lot of people keep asking about trade. Could we talk about that in a sort of generic sense because I know nothing is ready to announce yet, but do you have any like stories about discussions regarding trade? Like what happened with the bazaar?

Judd: I mean, trade is just so important and the implications are so large that we’ve had discussions about trade more than absolutely anything in the game period. We’ve been having those discussions at this point for five years without actually putting out anything in the wild. We have, as a very large proponent of players in the genre, we’ve played all of these games and people that we continue to hire play these games for thousands of hours and we know what comes from just even small decisions to trade.

We know that we’re not going to make absolutely everybody happy with any type of trade system that we put out there. So we really have to go back to the roots of what is Last Epoch and how we’ve built this game to be played and make sure that the trading system that we implement into the game does not overrule or adulterize what we’ve created here. We’ve created a game that the experience of going and finding loot and crafting that loot does feel good at the moment so we want to make sure that doesn’t change. There’s been an absolute ton of conversations on trade – it’s been excessive.

Steelmage: Yeah, I’d love to peep one of those conversations but maybe after trade’s released.

Judd: Yeah, you know, I can at least say that with the conversations that we have with trade we finally have nearly the entire team on board with the decision that we’re trialing in the near future. It makes sense to nearly every single person on the team and that’s a really good indication that we’ve arrived at something that we think is good for Last Epoch.

Source: YouTube Link

September 16, 2022

Mike reiterates points he’s discussed in both the September 2nd and 9th streams, but then reveals that the plan is to have some form of item transfer available in patch 0.9.

Q: Can you drop items in instances for other people?

Right now it doesn’t work yet. We’ve just had our, like, first practical item transfer happen – it went from one character back to that same character. Actually, we may have a little bit more than that happening now. I know there was a little bit of a break from working on that because we had to get some other stuff done for a patch that was coming for the Community Tester build. Unfortunately, there’s no details on trade that we can share yet. We’re still very early in the development process.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Is the bazaar close?

No, we have abandoned the bazaar. I apologize if you’re still seeing material on our website that talks about it. Hopefully that’s taken down already. We noticed there was some really old material on one of the sub-pages that we did not mean to still be there. We noticed that very recently as someone pointed it out on the forums for us.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: We should have some form of trade in 0.9 though, right?

I just want to be clear on what the definition of the term trade is. When you say some form of trade, the question that I’m answering is – will there be any method by which items can move between characters in some way? That is the plan, yes. What that looks like, any details of what that is…no information. Though, the plan is to have some way where items are transferred from some character to some other character in some situation, somehow. I hope that was clear.

Source: YouTube Link

September 23, 2022

Again, Mike comments that some form of trade is planned to be coming in patch 0.9.

Q: Do you plan to release multiplayer and trade soon?

So multiplayer is coming with our next major patch and the form of item transference between players, whatever that looks like, will be with that initial drop. We don’t have any timelines on when that will be specifically because it’s very much a when it’s ready thing.

We’re currently in closed testing for our multiplayer systems with a group of Community Testers. The Community Tester program is an open application process that has an almost 100% acceptance rate at this point, I think, but it just takes a while to get in. If you’ve submitted to that and you’re not in yet, I apologize. We’re working on it and we’re working on making the process faster too because we’ve got way more applications than we thought we’d have. Apparently there’s a lot of people that are interested in it. If you do get into that, a note in general, it’s still not a finished product yet and there’s a very long list of known bugs that I strongly recommend reading first before you start reporting bugs because most reports I see are on that list. Yeah, so we’re still working on it and there’s no details yet.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: When can we expect trading to come? Sometime after 1.0?

There will be a method by which items can be transferred between two players in 0.9, when that comes out.

Source: YouTube Link

September 24, 2022

Mike comments that nothing is known about how any future trade system will function and that they’re still working on its implementation and testing. So, nothing really new here but I included it anyways.

Q: This has probably been asked a million times but I couldn’t get a clear answer from the community. Can other players see the items we drop from our inventory in the 0.9 update?

The reason you can’t get a clear answer is that they don’t know. If anyone has said that they do, it is speculative. We haven’t stated if you will or not upon 0.9.

The closest thing to a reply to this that we have given in the past was that in a dev stream a few weeks back, someone asked something along the lines of drop trading could be added if a proper trade window setup wasn’t going to be possible. I replied that drop trading is probably actually even harder than a proper trade window.

There is no information as to the style or details of what the system by which items can be transferred from one player to another (trade) will be as of 0.9 or 1.0.

I know everyone is really anxious to learn more about our plans for trade but we aren’t ready to talk about it yet. We are still in early stages of initial implementation and it needs a lot more work before it’s ready for testing, let alone proper feedback and assessment. All of which needs to happen before we discuss it.

Source: Discord Link

---

I imagine the next time we receive any meaningful information concerning trade it’ll be within its own development blog. I’m looking forward to it.

[MasterBLB]

@AndrewTilley

trade should have as little impact on the SSF experience as possible

→ “trade should have absolutely no influence on the SFF experience”
Fixed it for you; you welcome.

[Llama8]

@MasterBLB

absolutely no influence

Good luck with that, especially given (currently) you can switch from ssf to normal.

[Zaodon]

@MasterBLB

“trade should have absolutely no influence on the SFF experience”

Absotively, posilutely.

[AndrewTilley]

September 30, 2022

Mike reaffirms a lot of what’s already been said throughout this thread, but I do like to keep people updated on everyone’s favourite subject, trade, so here’s this weeks installment.

Q: Will there be currency and/or money trades in the game? Most of the fun for me was selling items that I made/obtained and getting ‘rich’ by playing the trade market. Anything planned to allow this sort of thing in LE?

Mike: So we do have plans for, and I’m going to be as nebulous about this as possible, some mechanism by which items can transition between different players in some way. As vague as possible. [Mike laughs]

To the extent that you’re going after there about playing the market and focusing on that as a primary mechanic, no…I’m sorry. It pains me to say but if that’s what you’re looking for you’re probably going to be disappointed. We’re really trying to put an emphasis on going out and killing monsters and having that be the primary way for most people to get their gear. So I think you’ll have a tough time emulating that experience you may have had in other games playing a market like that.

You know, nothing’s set in stone, yada, yada, yada…but it’s really something we’re trying to hit home is the, like, let’s play the game and let’s have whatever sort of nebulous description of a trade system, whatever that is doing, it’s in support of that gameplay experience of going and killing monsters.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I assume there will be trading in multiplayer…

Mike: Define trading and I’ll tell you if that’s a huge assumption or not. [Mike laughs]

Q: Will items be bound to members where you were present at the time or anything can be traded to anyone?

Mike: We do not have any details about how trade will be set up at the moment that I can share with you, I apologize. Fully not answered…I know, it sucks.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I know trade is not set in stone, but how would it affect drop rates and what SSF considerations?

Mike: So the general goal, and I’m just repeating what I’ve said before here, the general goal is to have it impact drop rates in SSF as little as possible. We know that it will not be completely separate from it so we will have to take it into consideration when looking at drop rates and SSF, but it’s something that we’re hoping will have as little impact as possible and we’re designing it as such.

Source: YouTube Link

October 7, 2022

Mike gives a shoutout to this thread and again states that they’re not looking to add a multiplayer economy that players can focus on and play like a stock market.

Q: Can you tell us anything about trade? Is there anything you can share with us at this time?

Mike: Nothing other than what’s in the official documentation, like the Multiplayer FAQ. There’s some really broad strokes that were used there, but if you’ve read that then you know everything that’s public right now and if not go read it. Though, there’s not much there…there’s just some general philosophy stuff. I don’t have any details I can give you on what the – there’s actually a thread Andrew Tilley started on the forums as well that has literally, I think, every official communication we’ve given about trade and there’s a lot of stuff in there but I’d prefer, if possible, not to repeat it all over again. Sorry.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Do you expect multiplayer economy to be a big part of the game, or is the game more solo with party play tacked on?

Mike: I don’t think it’s either of those things, but the multiplayer economy is not something we’re focusing on as like a game mode to play. We don’t want people to be…how’d I word this last time? People who are looking to a market system as a way to like play the market as a primary gameplay method are probably going to be disappointed with the implementation that we’ve got ready. It’s something that still needs to go through several stages of feedback and that sort of stuff. If your goal is to come in and treat the trading market like a stock exchange and, you know, like buy/sell and accrue wealth and things like that…that’s not an experience we’re going to tailor to.

Source: YouTube Link

[DuckWho]

Back after 2 years and interesting to see they scrapped Bazaar. As someone who actually played games with such trading, I think it would have worked well but no reason to dwell on that right now.

[vapourfire]

@DuckWho

no reason to dwell on that right now.

This is a pretty good attitude to have with trading at the moment.

Honestly even the devs dont know what they are going to do (MikeW reiterates this almost daily on discord) so they have nothing to tell us about trade yet.

[Jerle]

@AndrewTilley

Mike gives a shoutout to this thread and again states that they’re not looking to add a multiplayer economy that players can focus on and play like a stock market.

Thanks for this. I havent been following what Mike had been sharing in his dev stream so this is helpful.

I get where Mike is coming from. I hate flipping in an ARPG too as well. And I like to earn my items through grinding the game. But I really hope whatever solution they pursue, they dont completely kill trade just to deal with flipping or RMT. I recently linked this video timestamp somewhere and I want to share it again too here. The video segment here from 15:00 to 16:00 really explains why trade feels so important to me in an ARPG.

SC Trade - Chris Wilson Interview ft. Grimro & Crouching_Tuna | Path of Exile

[Zaodon]

@Jerle

I really hope whatever solution they pursue, they dont completely kill trade just to deal with flipping or RMT.

Reading that properly, you’re saying you are ok with flipping and RMT to get trade.

No thanks. Trade isn’t even remotely needed in LE. WAY better to have no trade + no flipping/RMT than it would be to have trade+flipping+RMT. Like, its a no brainer.

[Llama8]

@Zaodon

Reading that properly, you’re saying you are ok with flipping and RMT to get trade.

No, he just hopes that their solution to make RMT & flipping not a thing doesn’t mean that there is no trade (or trade is as inconvenient as the Bazaar would have been).

[Zaodon]

I suppose that’s a fair interpretation.

[DuckWho]

@Zaodon

No thanks. Trade isn’t even remotely needed in LE.

My two cents: You can’t balance game in a way to satisfy both casuals and the people that love to grind without trade. I will talk for myself here, I have a job and a lot of different games that I am interested in. But I do want to check out some LE builds too. Suppose game has 10 chase uniques that each take roughly 200 hours to farm. In average I can play 20 hours to get 1 of those and trade for the one I want instead. If there was no trading, I would simply quit the game. On the other hand 20 hours is nothing for some people. Unless they introduce a way to change drop rates for each player to what they want, you can’t balance for this. That is what trade solves for me. If you want to grind, you can still grind. Nobody is forcing you to trade.

I guess the only worry here is if they balance it in a way considering trade so SSF players would be hurt in the process. That I would wait and see.

[lionking102]

I just hope we get some option to trade with friend. The only thing I want for trade is to give items to my group of friends I play with.
I love this groud-selffound experience and played Grim Dawn for years just sharing items with one or two friends. And I missed this so much in POE.
Not been able to farm an item and give it to my friends would be really sad.

[DiceDragon]

I think problem is that Chris’ take is exactly what people dislike. And is what promotes a “economy to further wealth gain”

its looking at items no longer for their value to you as an item, but their value as a currency.

You cant have a rich loot experience if you have markets like that, its not just about rmt or flipping. its about the psychological grab of the game. Many times in PoE an item will be released and players will go “well thats garbage its 1c” because the lens players in PoE view items through is purely a market one.

“why do I kill an end game boss to drop an axe worth 2c?” They dont actually care about if disfavor is good or not, they care whether or not it has value.

If trading exists as chris explains it, thats all that items are, is market tools.

I think the reason the devs will restrict trade so much is so that players continue to look at items for their merit as items rather then currency to buy other items.

Currently LE has a much better loot experience(Atleast for a player like me) then PoE because items you are interested in finding are ones you wish to use. Not simply tooling your filter to find the most “meta” items to sell to buy the ones you want.

Edit: what I will say, it does sound interesting how they will somehow make trading a thing, without these pitfalls, as they seem pretty clear there will be some kinda direct trading. Just not full on markets

[Jerle]

Thanks. Appreciate the very well articulated alternative response.

But I suppose your post further clarified for me the difference between a SSF player and someone like myself who tend to take a MP/“community” oriented view in online ARPG.

For solo players who essentially see the game as a single player game, your perspective makes complete sense. Item’s merits should rightfully be to the extend they are useful to you. And I totally see how a forced market perspective negatively impact your experience of loot drops.

But for players like myself who enjoys player interactions (whether it is the moment to moment gameplay in a party, or the broader game environment), I hope you can see why a market perspective to items make so much sense to me. Because in interacting with other players, the value of items is surely not just the worth of the items to me. But to these other players I interact with, and by extension, the entire online community at the meta environment level.

I know there are plenty of running jokes of “player interactions” in trade situations. But I think the implementation is besides the point. Items with market value at a fundamental level is what makes the online community relevant to me in the game. And I would like to make claim at this point that isn’t that the whole point to make the game online, with MP, and social hubs?